


May 2003

by helsinkibaby



Series: The Pieces of my Life [16]
Category: CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, The West Wing
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, F/M, Het, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-15
Updated: 2014-08-15
Packaged: 2018-02-13 07:46:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,507
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2142849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/helsinkibaby/pseuds/helsinkibaby
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Trauma comes in twos</p>
            </blockquote>





	May 2003

Greg has just finished dinner when the phone rings, and a wide smile spreads across his face when he sees the familiar name on caller ID. “Good evening,” he says when he picks up the phone, walking to the couch where he intends to make himself comfortable. He intends to prolong his greeting, say something pithy to make her laugh, but she cuts him off.

“I’m glad it is for you,” she tells him sourly, and he lifts both eyebrows in surprise. Hearing Ellie talk in that tone of voice is rare indeed.

Rare, but long experience with this woman has taught him exactly how to diffuse it. “Why Eleanor,” he drawls. “Has anyone ever told you that your sunny disposition is your most attractive trait?”

He grins upon hearing a burst of laughter from the other end of the line. “I’m sorry,” she says, chagrined, her laugh one of embarrassment, and he leans back against the couch cushions, props his legs on the coffee table.

“I take it someone’s had a bad day?” he guesses, and she makes a sound that’s usually accompanied by her eyes rolling.

“About to,” she tells him in a similar tone. “I’m about to get ready to go into the hospital to pull a twenty-four hour shift from hell… I’ve been sleeping all day, and still all I want to do is crawl back into bed.”

Her words conjure up an image of her crawling into his bed, an image that’s not unpleasant, and he shoos it away. “What is the nature of your shift from hell?” he asks, perfectly willing to let her vent, but Ellie has other ideas.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she tells him. “What I want to do is wish you a happy birthday.”

He grins. “It’s not my birthday until tomorrow,” he reminds her.

“And you know exactly what I’m going to be doing tomorrow,” she counters. “Unless of course, my dad manages to guilt trip me into going to Washington.”

Greg frowns, because Ellie’s dad doesn’t usually care whether she’s in Washington or not; the only time she’s had to go there in recent years is when she talked to the press about her father not firing the Surgeon General and received a summons for her trouble. “What’s going on in Washington?” he asks, is stunned by the answer.

“Zoey’s graduating.” He can’t speak for a second, because to him, Zoey is still the kid with braces and long red pigtails that he met that first summer when she and her parents picked Ellie up at Stanford. He knew, of course, that she was at college, that she’d begun taking classes at Georgetown a couple of years ago. But it had been a while since he’d seen her, and he’d lost track of time. “Didn’t I tell you that?” Ellie wonders, perhaps mistaking his silence for something else, and Greg nods quickly.

“You probably did,” he allows. “Guess it slipped my mind… wow.”

Ellie chuckles. “I know.”

“Your bratty little sister, old enough to graduate college,” Greg murmurs. “Are we getting old?”

“You are,” she tells him, and he shakes his head, knowing that he walked into that one. “And my little sister is not bratty.”

Greg stares at the phone receiver in frank amazement. “Isn’t that the exact word you used that time that she and your father nearly caught us in the hayloft? And she blackmailed you for the rest of the year?”

There’s a split second of silence, then Ellie laughs. “I forgot all about that,” she says.

“Changing your mind about the brat thing?”

“Little bit.”

He chuckles at that, then goes serious. Or as serious as he gets with Ellie anyway. “So, what’s the brat got planned for after college?”

“She’s going to France for three months,” Ellie tells him, then adds with considerable distaste, “With Jean-Paul. His family have a chateau in the middle of nowhere… my dad’s not too impressed, but we can’t talk her out of it.”

Greg grins, even if he doesn’t think that it’s too funny. “He’s as obnoxious as I’ve heard?” he asks, because he’s heard plenty, though Ellie’s next comment reminds him that it hasn’t all been from her.

“Worse,” she says. “But I didn’t think I told you that much about him.”

“You didn’t,” he agrees. “But Charlie’s not too enamoured of him.”

Ellie snickers. “He wouldn’t be.” Then something occurs to her. “You’ve talked to Charlie about Zoey’s boyfriend?”

“Some reason we shouldn’t?” He’d met Charlie at the Bartlet farm the previous Christmas, back when Charlie was still dating Zoey, and the two men had hit it off very well, both being treated like members of the family while knowing that they weren’t really entitled to such status.

“No… I just didn’t realise you guys kept in touch,” Ellie tells him, and he shrugs.

“Charlie and I have a lot in common.”

“Such as?” She sounds amused, but his reply is serious, deadly serious.

“Bartlet women,” he tells her simply, remembering escaping one night to the bar in Manchester with Charlie, drinking a toast to just that, “Bartlet women… and the men who love them.”

“Ah.” It’s said so softly that Greg can barely hear her, and for an instant, he almost regrets saying it.

Almost.

“Just so I’m clear on this,” he says, his tone considerably lighter. “Your dad is letting Zoey, his baby, his little girl, go all the way across the ocean to France, to spend three months in an isolated spot with her boyfriend? Has something happened to him that I don’t know about?”

Ellie giggles. “Surprised us too,” she says. “I told Zoey that Liz and I broke him in for her… we never would have been allowed to do that.” Indeed, it had been hard enough to get her father to accept Ellie staying in San Francisco for the summer when she was in college, or to come out to join him for a week the summer between her freshman and sophomore year. “Of course,” she added thoughtfully, “The Secret Service detail sweetens the pot a little.”

“As they would.” Greg’s seen the Service in action, he sure wouldn’t like to cross them. “The shoot to kill policy still in place?”

“With the boyfriend as the number one target,” Ellie agrees, sounding quite happy at the prospect.

“You sound like you agree with your dad about this one,” Greg surmises, and is almost deafened by the sigh she gives in response.

“I talked to her about it,” she tells him. “And she told me that she’s sick of being our father’s daughter… sick of everything she does being in the public eye, her grades, her friends, her boyfriends… I mean, her first serious relationship nearly ends up getting her father shot.” The words so easily said remind Greg of one of the worst nights of their lives, of a red-eye Vegas to Baltimore flight, of Ellie crying in his arms.

“That’s a lot to handle,” he agrees. “And it’s nothing you haven’t said yourself.” He still remembers finding out by accident that her father was Governor of New Hampshire; she’d kept it well under her hat during her first few weeks at Stanford. He knew that the level of attention had increased dramatically since her father’s election as President, had seen it first hand. He also knew that Zoey, as the youngest, got it worse than Ellie, whose workaholic, non-partying tendencies for once turned out to be blessing rather than curse. Paparazzi generally tired of following her from home to library to class, and when she did go out, when she did date, she was discreet about it.

“I understand why she’s doing it,” she tells him now. “God, Greg, if anyone knows what it’s like to want to get away from being Jed Bartlet’s daughter…” Her voice trails off. “I know why she’s doing it,” she repeats. “I just don’t know why she’s doing it with him.”

“Maybe it’ll get it out of her system,” he says, looking on the bright side of things. “Or get Jean-Paul out of her system. Familiarity breeds contempt and all that.”

“I said the same thing to my dad,” she says. “And you know what he said?” She pauses to allow him time to guess, but he doesn’t even try. “He said, ‘Yeah, cause that worked so well for you and Greg’.”

Greg’s jaw drops. “You’re kidding me.”

“Would I?” She would, and he knows she would, but he also knows from the tone of her voice that she’s not doing it now. “He still asks about you, you know.”

“I will never understand your dad,” he decides, and she laughs softly.

“That makes two of us.” There’s nothing he can say to that, and perhaps sensing that, she changes the subject. “So, any nice plans for your birthday?”

He shrugs. “Well, I’m working in a couple hours… and also tomorrow night, so not really. John and I will probably hit the town at the weekend, make up for it then…”

“No special lady waiting to take you out?” she queries, and Greg’s reply is automatic.

“You’re the only lady in my life Eleanor,” he says. “You know that.” He says it jokingly, but he’s uncomfortably close to the truth, and they both know it. He’s uncharacteristically lost for words, and hears her suck in a deep breath.

“Look, Greg…” Then she pauses, and he hears her mutter something that he can’t quite make out under her breath. “Greg, there’s another call coming through… can you hang on?”

“Not a problem,” he assures her, beginning to zap through the television channels while he waits for her to come back. When she eventually does, her voice is harried, and she sounds even more annoyed than she had at the start of the conversation.

“You think it’s a bad sign when the day is bad before it even starts?” she asks, her voice wry. “That was the hospital… they want to know if I can come in early.”

“Go,” he says. “I have to get ready soon myself.”

“OK.” She sounds reluctant though, or maybe he’s reading too much into her pause, investing it with his own mood. “I’ll try to call tomorrow. But if I don’t, have a great day.”

Greg nods. “You too. Bye Ellie.”

“Bye Greg.”

The next thing he hears is a dial tone, and it is a long time before he puts the phone down on the table. It’s even longer before he stands up to go to work.

Once he gets to work, he doesn’t have time to think about Ellie, barely has time to watch the clock. There are thirteen active cases on his books, thirteen pieces of evidence that he has to process, and he has no time to think about his love life, or the lack thereof, no time to think of his birthday or Zoey’s graduation or anything else.

The only time he pauses in his work is when he smells burning plastic, when he looks around to locate the source.

Then there is a loud bang, and he is flying through the air, landing hard on the ground. Hard flakes of snow fall on top of him, and he realises dimly that it is not snow, but glass, and there is flame and burning and alarms going off and considerable pain. There is Sara, lying on the ground, looking at him with horror etched in her features.

Then there is blessed blackness.

>*<*>*<

Ellie might be having the shift from hell, but, as she works in the ER, up to her elbows in blood and guts and gore, she realises that there is something to be thankful for. No matter how hard the work is, no matter how distressing the cases she sees, at least there is no time to dwell on what she is seeing, or on how tired she is. It’s one thing after another, and she barely has time to grab a cup of tea and a sandwich in between all the things she has to do. She does manage to beg enough spare minutes to enable her to watch some of her father’s Georgetown commencement speech, catch a glimpse of her mother, beaming proudly in the stands, a string of pearls around her neck that Ellie’s never seen before. She sees Zoey too, her little bratty sister all grown up and graduated from college, looking so thrilled, happier than Ellie can remember seeing her in a long time, and she stands in the break room of a Baltimore Hospital with tears in her eyes.

There are times, many times, when she hates being the President’s daughter.

But there are times when she is proud to be a Bartlet, and this is just such an occasion.

Still though, proud as she is of her father, and her sister, she knows that she has to go back to work, which is just what she does, and she works hard, loses all track of time.

Until, that is, the doors of the emergency room burst open and every Secret Service agent on her detail streams in. Luckily, she’s not working on any patients, but she is holding a clipboard in one hand and a pen in the other; both crash to the ground in sheer shock. A little voice in her head tells her that those are important hospital records, that she should treat them with more respect that that, but said little voice is silenced, even as it screams louder than ever when Declan, her lead agent, takes a firm grip of her arm.

“Sorry Ellie,” he says, sounding anything but, not sounding anything but all business. “We need you to come with us now.” She opens her mouth to protest, looks at the supervising physician to apologise, but Declan is still talking, but not to her, to the others in the room. “Our superiors will be in touch.”

He propels her forwards, another of her agents, James, taking her by the other arm, and between the two of them, she is swept outside, her feet literally not touching the ground. By the time they bundle her into a car though, her thoughts are somewhat more in order, and she is spewing questions right and left. “What the hell is going on here?” is the latest in a long line of ones that have gone unanswered. “What’s wrong? What’s happened to my father?”

It is only when they are in the car, when she is sitting beside Wendy, a third agent, a woman the same age as her older sister Elizabeth, who is looking at her with worried eyes. “It’s not your father,” she says softly. “It’s Zoey.”

She continues talking, but as the world tilts and whirls around Ellie, she only catches every other word. Something about Zoey and a nightclub, the words missing and dead agent at the scene making her stomach twist painfully.

Her bratty little sister is missing, and every nightmare scenario that’s ever been outlined to her invades her mind in living colour.

They are nearly at her apartment before she can speak, and it’s cold comfort to know that her parents are both in the White House, that Liz and her family are all safe in their house.

It’s no comfort at all when she thinks to ask after the dead agent, and is told that it’s Molly O’Connor, Molly who was on her detail for almost a year, Molly who was more of a friend than an agent. Molly who stayed with her that long terrible night when her father had been shot. Molly, who probably broke several rules of Secret Service procedure when she let Greg into Ellie’s apartment, told the other agent to leave them alone there, because she’d met Greg before and knew that he was exactly what Ellie needed.

Between the thought of Molly’s death and Greg, tears come to Ellie’s eyes, as she grieves for one, and wishes with all her heart that the other was here with her.

When she gets to her apartment, she just wants to be alone, but thanks to the situation, that’s not even an option. She goes into the bathroom to shower, wash the grime of the shift off her, and while normally she would linger, tonight the shower is a quick one, just in case there is any news of Zoey while she is gone. When she emerges though, hair damp around her shoulders, in her oldest, most faded, most comfortable blue jeans, and an over-sized sweatshirt that once belonged to Greg, Declan shakes his head, and she sinks down on the couch to wait.

And wait.

The chances of anyone calling her with regard to any substantive about Zoey are few and far between, but she knows that the Secret Service are keeping an eye on the phones, just in case. So she screens her calls, grateful that she has a ready-made excuse not to answer the phone, not to talk to anyone. Declan keeps her updated on what’s going on at the White House, and she shares a quick, frantic conversation with Liz. With everyone else though, she simply turns away, tries not to listen.

She looks at the numbers though, waiting for the one call that hasn’t come yet, the call that she is expecting. When it comes, she half-expects Declan to physically restrain her, and she’s sure he wants to, but she’s too quick for him, grabbing the phone and pressing it to her ear.

“Greg?” There are tears in her eyes and her throat and her voice, and she can’t believe how much she wants to see him, how much she wants him to hold her and tell her that everything is going to be all right.

“Ellie?”

Her heart stops beating when she hears the voice, because while she knows it, it’s not the one she was expecting, not the voice that normally comes from this number. “John?” she chokes out, a thousand questions in her mind that she’s unable to voice, and he must hear that, because he speaks quickly, as if he’s afraid that he won’t get his news out before she loses her reason completely.

Of course, he’s not that far wrong.

“Look,” he says. “There’s no need for you to panic.”

A few minutes ago, Ellie would have said that she was beyond panic. She’s finding out now just how wrong she was. “What’s happened John?” she asks, finally finding her voice, and it hardly sounds like her voice at all. “Where’s Greg?”

John draws in a deep breath, but when he speaks, he doesn’t beat around the bush, for which she is thankful. “There was an explosion at the lab,” he tells her. “They don’t know what caused it… but he was there when it happened… he got thrown through a window, he’s got cuts and bruises, burns on his back…” She inhales a shuddering breath, which becomes a sob, sinks back down onto the arm of the couch, because her legs can’t support her anymore. “Ellie, he’s going to be fine.”

“Are you sure?” Because it strikes her now, with considerable force, that she couldn’t stand it if anything happened to him.

“They called me when it happened,” he assures her. “I was at the hospital most of the day, I’ve just come home now… he’s awake, more or less… pretty doped up on painkillers, but he’s himself, he’s talking…”

She laughs, a touch hysterically she thinks, and she works hard to rein herself in. “Is he hitting on the nurses yet?”

There’s a dry chuckle from the other end of the phone. “Give him time,” John says, and she knows that he’s not kidding. Then he pauses, and she knows what he’s going to say next. “Look, I’ve only just heard about Zoey… is there any word?”

Ellie shakes her head, looks up towards the ceiling, thinking how impossible it is that a matter of hours ago, she was sitting on this couch, talking to Greg about how her little sister was graduating college, teasing him about getting old. Now he was in the hospital, and Zoey was missing, and she was stuck here in Baltimore, not able to help anyone she loved who needed her. “No,” she whispers. “I’m under lockdown here… I’m going to Washington in the morning.” First light or sooner, she’d made Declan promise, because she needed to be in Washington, needed to see her parents.

Though there’s a part of her that really needs to be in Las Vegas.

“You want me to tell Greg? I know he’ll want to talk to you…”

She nods, but she’s thinking about him, about what he’s going to be able for in the next few days, her doctor’s mind superseding her friendly concerns. “When you think he’s ready,” she says. But she can’t resist asking, “What hospital-?”

“Desert Palm,” John replies, and she can hear the smile in his voice.

“Thanks,” she says, reaching for a pen to take down the name, dropping the idea when she drops the pen, her hand shaking too much to even think about writing legibly. “If you hear anything-”

“You’ll be the first one I call,” he promises.

“Thanks John.” With that, she hangs up the phone, throws it down on the couch beside her, dropping her head into her hands and taking several deep, calming breaths that do nothing to calm her. It is a long time before she looks up at Declan, even longer before she can stand up, tell him, “I’m going to bed now.” She doesn’t ask him to wake her if there’s any news. She knows that he will.

So she goes into her bedroom and closes the door firmly behind her, leans against it as she marshals the energy to walk the couple of steps to her bed.

Once there, she lies down, hugs her spare pillow to her, wishing that it were someone else. Only then does she let herself cry.

>*<*>*<

Greg remembers very little about the explosion, and from the woozy sensation he gets whenever he moves his head, not to mention the total absence of feeling in his back, he thinks that he’s not going to remember very much about his initial time in the hospital either. Which, he knows, is probably a good thing for him, but not so much for Catherine and Warrick, who have evidently drawn the short straw in finding out what happened.

They interview him, not pushing very hard, and he can’t tell them anything, and when they go, he is lying on his side, looking at the corridor and waiting area through the windows, looking at the people coming and going. He knows that she should be sleeping, knows that if he asks, he could undoubtedly be given something to knock him out, but his mind is whirring, albeit in slightly slow motion, as he tries to piece together the last moments before the world blew up around him.

He’s not having very much luck though, and he’s distracted by a pattern that he begins to notice, something that’s happening outside the window. He can see people standing still, huddled together in bunches, all of them staring up at a television suspended high in the waiting area. They walk through, and then they stop, staring up with expressions that range from shock to horror and, in a few cases, tears. There is something wrong, Greg is sure of it, and curiosity gets the better of him, has him narrowing his eyes, turning his better-than-perfect eyesight on the television screen, trying to see what they’re all seeing.

Between the distance and the drugs, it’s hard to know anything for sure, but there is a news ticker running along the bottom of the screen, and it looks very much as if some of the shots are coming from outside, because the screen is black, and there are flashing lights, police cars, he thinks, in the background. There is a logo in the top right hand corner of the screen that he can’t make out from this distance, but then the screen shifts, the picture changes, and he feels himself grow very cold all over.

The picture is of President Bartlet, and he is taking the Oath of Office. Greg recognises the set up from seeing it copious times on the news back in January, and besides, he’s known the President for a long time and would recognise him anywhere. Then the picture changes again, to show the President and his wife and their three daughters, footage that was taken at one of the Inaugural Balls, footage that he’d taken great delight in teasing Ellie about. She’d laughed, and she’d complained, about the camera crews and the stage-managing of the family and about how her feet had been killing her all night, but when he’d stopped laughing, told her how beautiful he thought she was, she’d stopped laughing too.

There are only a few reasons why the news networks would be running news tickers and archive footage of the President and his family, and none of them are good.

Greg is saved from further speculation when the door to his room opens, and a nurse comes in. She is white-haired and diminutive, named Bess, and she’s been in here with him before. She was very kind to him when they first set him up here, reminding him a little of his Nana Helga, and she is all concern and solicitude again now. “How are we doing in here?” she asks, coming over to stand in front of him, the little lines between her eyes deepening when she sees the look on his face. “Are you in a lot of pain?”

Greg ignores her question completely, answering it with one of his own. “What’s happening out there?” he asks. “On the television?”

She looks over her shoulder, her features registering dismay, but when she looks down at him again, she is firm; Nana Helga refusing to let him, all of fifteen years old, have a glass of wine at the party for his parents’ twentieth wedding anniversary. “You don’t concern yourself with that,” she says, in a tone that would normally not leave room for argument, but Greg is scared out of his mind that something has happened to Ellie or her family, and he needs to know what’s happened.

“You have to tell me,” he says, that fear chasing the last of the drugs induced lethargy from his mind, and the urgency in his tone stops her short. “What’s happened to the President? Is he ok? Was it another shooting, his MS…?”

“No, no, nothing like that.” She is quick to reassure him, even if it’s quite clear that she doesn’t understand why this is so important to him. “It’s not him…” She throws another glance over her shoulder, shaking her head as she looks back around at him. “One of his daughters has been kidnapped.”

Greg is sure that whatever monitors he’s hooked up to are going to be giving off some rather strange readings in the next few seconds, because he’s sure that his heart stops when he hears that news. It’s absolutely the last thing that he wants to hear, and it takes him a good thirty seconds to suck enough air into his lungs, to get his mind working enough, to ask the question. “Which daughter?”

Bess’s lips are set in a thin line. “Mr Sanders,” she says, as if she’s hoping that formality will calm him down. “You’re going to have to calm down-”

At this point in time, Greg could no more calm down without knowing if Ellie is all right than he could sprout wings and fly to the moon. “Which daughter?” he asks again, struggling to push himself up, ignoring both the pain that shoots across his back and Bess’s start towards him. “Is it Ellie? You’ve got to tell me, has something happened to Ellie?” Bess is protesting, and he thinks she’s trying to get him to lie back down, but suddenly there is a third voice in the room, one that he knows very well. He looks up, sees his best friend and roommate standing there, his dark eyes worried, face drawn, and that’s who he directs his next enquiry to. “John… is it Ellie? What’s happened to her?”

John gives Bess a look as he goes over to Greg’s bedside, laying one hand on his shoulder and pushing him down. “Greg, she’s fine… are you listening to me? Ellie’s fine.” That’s enough to have Greg lying back down, only a little less agitated, and John turns to Bess, tells her, “It’s fine… I can handle this.”

Bess isn’t sure. “Should I get the doctor?”

John shakes his head, a firm no. “I’ll talk to him,” he promises, and Bess backs away, but she doesn’t leave the room.

Greg reaches up, clamping his hand down on John’s arm, making his friend look at him. “Ellie?” he asks, and John gives him half a smile.

“She’s fine Greg. She’s at home in Baltimore, and she’s fine. I was talking to her not thirty minutes ago.”

Greg nods, more relieved than he can possibly put into words. “She’s ok,” he repeats, closing his eyes. They open again when he realises the implications. “Who?”

John sighs. “Zoey.”

The single word has Greg closing his eyes again, feeling once more cold all over. A hundred different images of Zoey Bartlet play across the back of his eyelids, his own private home cinema system. Zoey the first time they met, when she came with her parents to pick Ellie up at the end of her first year at Stanford. All he can remember are red hair and braces, the shy smile to her big sister’s boyfriend, a shy smile that disappeared quickly over the next few months as they traded hellos when she answered the phone to him. It had faded altogether by the time he made his first trip to the Manchester farm, was a dim and distant memory by the time that she nearly caught himself and Ellie in the hayloft one summer’s day, only her quick thinking saving her father from catching them too. He remembers her laughing and joking and being the world’s worst Trivial Pursuit player and he can’t even imagine what she’s going through now.

He forces his eyes open, looks into John’s concerned face. “Do they know-?”

“No word yet. She was at a graduation party, no-one’s really sure what’s going on…” He pauses. “There was a dead Secret Service agent at the scene.”

During that pause, Greg had been wondering if she’d simply given her agents the slip; after all, it wouldn’t be the first time it had been done, he had witnessed it personally with Ellie, been the cause of it even. But a dead agent meant that whoever had Zoey, they were playing for keeps.

“I need to talk to Ellie,” he says, trying to sit up again and failing completely.

“Look, she’ll understand,” John tells him, but Greg knows that it’s not a matter of understanding. It’s a matter of her needing him and him not being there, and he has to talk to her, for both their sakes. “I told her about what happened,” John continues, forcing Greg to lie back down, not having to exert much force to do it. “She knows where you are, I’m sure she’ll call tomorrow…”

Greg’s head is spinning, and out of the corner of his eye, he sees Bess approaching, a needle in her arm. “I need to talk to her…” he repeats as she pushes up the sleeve of his hospital gown.

“She’ll call tomorrow,” John promises. “She’s going to want to check that you’re not hitting on the nurses, isn’t she?”

It’s a joke, even if there’s probably a little bit of truth in it, and it makes him smile as the needle slides into his arm and blackness once more overwhelms him.

>*<*>*<

Greg sleeps, and he does so without dreams, and when he wakes up, he sees a blonde woman staring out his hospital room window. For a moment, one crazy moment, he thinks that it is Ellie, that she’s come to see him, but then he realises that the hair is too short and the body is all wrong, and then the woman turns, sees him there, and it is Catherine.

“What time is it?” he asks her, and she comes over to sit beside his bed.

“Late,” she tells him, but that doesn’t tell him anything, how long he’s been out, how long Zoey’s been missing, so he tries again.

“How long have you been here?”

“A while,” she answers. “I’ve got a little time on my hands.”

There’s something very sober, very serious, about Catherine at the moment, and remembering their last conversation, albeit as if through a veil, Greg realises what must have happened. For a few seconds, thoughts of Ellie and Zoey fly from his head as he begins to wonder if he’s going to have a job to get back to when he gets out of here. “You figured out what happened in the lab, didn’t you?”

“Yeah.” Catherine sighs, pulls up a chair and sits down heavily. “Yeah… and I wanted you to hear it from me.”

She talks and he listens, hears about the hot plate and the unknown substance and how she’s been suspended for five days. About how sorry she is for being so careless, about how she’s really sorry that he ended up being hurt. She actually seems more upset about it than he is, and she seems surprised when he tells her that it’s fine, that it was an accident and that these things happen.

“You should be angry with me,” she tells him, and he smiles, shakes his head, because he knows that there are worse things in the world that this. In a few days, he will be out of the hospital, on the road to recovery.

But Ellie’s dad will still be the President, and he will still have MS, and God only knows what will have happened to Zoey between then and now.

He doesn’t ask Catherine if she’s heard anything about the President’s daughter; he can’t. That would lead to too many questions about why he wants to know, and besides, she has enough of her own angst to worry about without him loading some of his on to add to the burden. He can wait until Bess comes back or until John comes in, or some other random nurse who he can question under the guise of small talk. He’s pretty sure that Catherine would figure out that there was more to it than that, but he’s also pretty sure that her guilt will blind her to anything being out of the ordinary if he just pleads fatigue.

So, mentally sending up prayers for forgiveness to anyone who might be listening, he tells her that he’s tired, and gets the expected response, that he should get some rest. She seems set on staying though, so he closes his eyes, tries to pretend like he’s sleeping, listening to Catherine’s breathing, waiting for her to move.

When he opens his eyes again, just a fraction, just in case, Catherine’s chair is empty, and the light in the room is completely different, and Greg realises that he had indeed fallen asleep. He closes his eyes, cursing himself mentally, and opens them slowly, hoping that he’ll be able to see the television in the room beyond, will catch a news update.

Instead, he is shocked at the sight before him. Standing at the window, looking out at the Vegas night, there is a vision, one than has never been more welcome to him. “Ellie?” he whispers, and she turns sharply at his voice, smiling when she sees him, though it’s the shakiest smile he thinks he’s ever seen. “What are you doing here?” he whispers, because she shouldn’t be here in Vegas with him. She should be in Baltimore in her apartment, or in Washington, with her family, and a million questions come to mind, chief amongst them how long was he asleep for, have they found Zoey, is she all right?

She shakes her head as she comes towards him, cutting off his questions, tucking a strand of now-blonde hair behind one ear. The change in colour is a recent development, and the movement brings back memories of the first time he’d seen her hair that colour; back in March when the two of them met up for a long weekend in New York. He made a show of not being able to recognise her, took great delight in whistling the old black and white “Blondie” theme tune, just to get a rise out of her , and it always did. He can hardly believe that that was only a few weeks ago, that they were so happy and so carefree such a short space of time ago, and now, look at them, each in their own particular circle of hell. He doesn’t take his eyes off her as she approaches him, sinks down in the chair beside his bed and takes his hands in hers. “Dope,” she whispers, and this close to her, he can see her red eyes, the tracks of previously shed tears on her cheeks, can see more threatening to trace their path. “What, you think you’re the only one who can ride to the rescue?”

He grins weakly, closing his eyes for a moment, concentrating on her touch, the familiar sound of her breathing. It relaxes him, and he lets himself bask in it for just a moment. Then he opens his eyes, frowns, because she really shouldn’t be here. “Zoey?” he asks, still not raising his voice, as if he’s afraid that she, that the moment, will shatter and break if he raises his voice. “Is there any-?”

“Sssh.” She shakes her head again, reaching out to lay a finger on his lips. “Don’t.” He’s not sure if the words or the movement loosened the tears, but either way, she is crying, and that hurts him worse than any glass window or burns could, because he can’t stand to see her cry.

“Don’t cry…” he pleads, and she nods, looking faintly embarrassed, but the hand that was on his lips has moved, is now resting on his cheek, and he moves his head, nudging her palm lightly, gratified when she smiles the faintest of smiles.

“What are we like?” she wonders aloud, and were he not aware that doing so would cause serious pain, he would shrug a jaunty shrug.

“Soulmates?” is his suggestion, and there’s a real chuckle in response.

“Maybe,” she allows, leaning forward and kissing him. When she pulls back, she lets her head rest on his pillow so that she can look into his eyes. “I love you.”

He grins. “I love you too.”

“Close your eyes,” she tells him, her hand moving through his hair. “Get some sleep.”

Nodding, he does as he’s told, asking “How long are you going to stay?”

Her tone is teasing, and when she answers, she throws back words he’d once said to her, in similar circumstances, at the same time of the year. “Does forever work for you?”

“That sounds fine,” he mumbles, letting himself surrender to sleep, his lullaby her quiet breathing, her fingers moving through his hair.

No sooner has he fallen asleep than the chair beside him scrapes, and he opens his eyes, worried that something has happened to her, that she’s seen or heard some news about Zoey. Much to his surprise, he finds himself looking not into Ellie’s concerned face, but Nick’s, hears his friend’s voice saying, “Hey, you’re awake…”

Greg squeezes his eyes shut, twists his head around in confusion. “Ellie?” he mumbles, and when he opens his eyes, Nick’s face is a mask of confusion.

“Man, I know you’ve got a concussion…” he begins, and Greg shakes his head quickly, blinking again.

“She wasn’t just here?” he asks, and Nick shakes his head slowly.

“I met Cath on my way out,” he says. “She said you were asleep; I just thought I’d stay for a little while, in case you woke up…” He frowns, and Greg knows what the next question out of his mouth is going to be. “Who’s Ellie?”

Greg sighs. “Just a friend,” he says, and despite being bedridden, he hopes that his tone will signal to Nick that he’s not going to talk about it. Of course, maybe the bedridden thing will do that all on its own. Just in case however, he steams straight in with, “So, tell me about the investigation…”

Nick gives him a strange look, but obliges, and if he notices that Greg’s attention occasionally drifts over his shoulder to the television in the hallway, and the pictures of a red-headed girl who is still missing, then he’s friend enough not to comment.

>*<*>*<

Later, when Ellie looks back on those terrible days at the end of May, she will think that it all seems like some kind of terrible dream, or nightmare. She will remember the dreams that plagued her restless sleep, dreams where both Greg and Zoey are trapped inside a burning building, where she can hear their screams, hear them calling her, but try as she might, she can never reach them. She wakes up from those dreams, chest heaving as if she’s been running, throat hoarse as if she’s been screaming, eyes streaming from the smoke, and she closes her eyes tightly to try to banish the images. Of course, that only makes the images come into sharper focus, so she rises from her bed, showers and changes quickly, asking the agents when she emerges if there is any news. It’s a mere function, because she knows that if there had been, they would have woken her, would have called her, but she has to ask anyway.

She makes herself a quick cup of tea, wishing, for once in her life, that she drank coffee. The thought brings to mind a certain peppy lab tech, and she can almost hear him beside her, babbling away nineteen to the dozen about the healing powers of a cup of coffee, Blue Hawaiian, forty bucks an ounce, the nectar of the Gods. It’s enough to make her eyes smart all over again, and she has to swallow hard, forcing the scalding hot liquid down her throat. She knows that she should eat something, but the thought of it is enough to make her stomach turn, so she simply adds more milk to the cup, knocking in back in a few swift gulps before turning to the agents, asking them is it time to leave yet.

The forty-five minute car journey seems to take far longer, and by some freak coincidence - or Secret Service planning, she’s not sure which – her car pulls up at the same time as Liz’s. Her parents are standing on the portico, waiting for them, and the second she sees them, she’s a little girl again, just wanting to feel her mother’s arms around her to make everything all right. Even Liz, the older sister, a mother herself, seems to feel the same way, and from the way Mom’s arms go around them, draw them close to her as if she never wants to let them go, she can guess how she’s feeing.

She’s never liked being in the White House at the best of times, and these are far from the best of times, when all she can do is sit around with Doug and Liz and her mom, trying to keep Gus and Annie occupied. Gus, at five, is too young to understand, but Annie, going on for sixteen understands all too well, knows exactly what could be happening to Zoey. Just like she understands that her grandfather has invoked the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, has handed over the Presidency to his greatest political enemy, because there’s no way that the President of the United States should be in a position to negotiate with his daughter’s kidnappers.

Which is to be admired, and she knows this. But it also means that they’re a step removed from any information that might be coming in about Zoey, means that they have to wait a few extra minutes before they’re told what’s happening.

And at no time is that more apparent than when they are sitting in the living room of the residence, staring at the television set in the hopes that CNN will trump Leo and the Secret Service when that’s exactly what happens.

That’s how she finds out that her little sister might have been kidnapped because her father ordered the assassination of the Qumari Foreign Minister last summer.

She can’t believe it at first, doesn’t want to believe it, the words, “My father would never do that,” running through her head. But then she looks at him, and she knows that it’s true.

Her mother walks out the room, and Ellie hesitates only for a few moments before following her, but she doesn’t talk to her about it, instead goes up to the room that’s her room when she stays here. It’s not her room though, not really, and she feels more alone here than ever.

There’s only one person she wants to talk to, and her hand hovers over her cell phone, her fingers itching to press speed dial number one. She stops herself though, because for one, she knows that he’s not going to be there. For another, the knowledge of where he is gives her pause, because he’s lying in a hospital bed, with his own set of problems, and it’s not fair to call him up and cry all over him. Which, much as she might like to pretend she’s being strong, she knows is exactly what she’ll do.

So instead she lies on the bed, stares up at the ceiling and tries not to think about him.

The phone beginning to ring makes her jump, and she reaches for it, instinctively checking the caller ID. It’s a number she doesn’t recognise, but it’s a Las Vegas area code, and her heart begins beating double time as she answers it.

“Hello?” Her voice, even to her own ears, is shaking, and it’s answered by one that’s just as shaky.

“Ellie? It’s me.”

It’s the voice she’s been dying to hear, and just as she knew she would, she promptly bursts into tears. “Greg?” she sobs, not even trying to stop the tears rolling down her cheeks. “Greg, are you ok?”

“Hey… I’m fine… Ellie, I’m fine…” His voice is low, strong, and someone else might almost be fooled. But she knows him, knows when he’s lying to her, and she can hear the strain in his voice. “How are you?”

“I’m ok.” She answers automatically, because it’s something that she’s always said, always done, told people that she’s fine when really she’s not. Greg’s the only person she’s never had to lie to, and she tells herself that this isn’t really a lie. She doesn’t want him to worry about her, so it’s in a good cause.

“Sure.” From the tone of his voice, he believes her as much as she believes him. “Is there any news?”

Ellie laughs, a sound that’s completely devoid of humour. “On Zoey? Nothing since the ransom note. Except that they now think that she’s kidnapped because Dad ordered the Qumari Foreign Minister assassinated.”

There is a long silence from the other end of the phone. Then one word. “Shit.”

Ellie can’t help it; she bursts out laughing. It’s pretty much the only word that can sum things up for either of them at the moment, and for some reason, it strikes her as hilarious. There’s some detached little part at the back of her mind muttering something about hysteria, and that voice is enough to have her reining in her giggles. “Yeah,” she says, wiping at her eyes. “How are you?” she asks then, softer. “Really?”

“John called you?” It’s a question that doesn’t need an answer, so she just waits, and he continues. “It’s not so bad… I’ll be out in a couple of days. Burns to my back, cuts and bruises… and one hell of a headache. But I’ll live.”

She shakes her head, pulls her pillow closer to her. “I was so worried about you…” she whispers, a fresh wave of tears breaking, and he shushes her again.

“You know me Ell,” he says, and he almost sounds like his old self. “It’s gonna take a lot more than that to stop me.” Then he sighs, comes over all serious. “I just wish I could be there for you.”

“Dope.” She smiles at that. “You don’t have to keep riding to my rescue you know.” Because he’s done that for her on at least three occasions that she can think of; dropping everything to come to her side when life was overwhelming her. The run-up to the first election, that terrible May night when her father was shot, and then again a year later when Mrs Landingham died and her father was going public with his MS. She expects him to deny it, so his soft chuckle comes as something of a surprise.

“Funny,” he tells her.

She frowns. “What?”

“I had a dream about you… and you said almost the exact same thing.”

“You had a dream about me?” She lifts an eyebrow, unable to keep back the teasing tone in her voice. She thinks that it’s probably bad form to be acting like this when Zoey is still who-knows-where, but this is Greg, and he’s always had this effect on her, has always been able to make her smile. “Should I be worried?”

“It was all very innocent,” he assures her, and she waits for the next word, knowing what’s coming. “Unfortunately.” She laughs and so does he. “That’s better…” he says afterwards. “You know I’d be there if I could, right?”

“You know it goes both ways.”

There’s a moment of companionable silence, then he sighs. “Look, I have to go… I’ve got a nurse in here glaring at me… I think she wants the phone back…”

Ellie nods, even as more tears smart in her eyes, because she wants to talk to him forever, or until Zoey is found, whichever comes first. “OK… go get better,” she tells him. “I’ll call you when I can.”

“You’d better. And when Zoey gets home, tell her I said hey.”

“When” he said, not “If” and in a tone of total confidence, one that sets Ellie crying again. “Greg?” she says, because there’s something she needs to tell him before he hangs up the phone. Her throat is just full of emotion at the moment, his name a strangled croak from her lips.

“Yeah?”

She swallows hard, tells him something she’s sure he knows, but that she hasn’t told him in a long time. “I love you.”

There’s silence, then she hears him smile. “I love you too.”

Then all she hears is a dial tone.

She lies down on her bed for a long time, holding her pillow close to her, re-living his words, the sound of his voice. Eventually, that’s what gives her the strength to brave the halls of the residence again, ending up in the kitchen where she begins preparing food with her mother, a voice in the back of her head that sounds far too like Greg for comfort telling her that she needs to eat. It even sustains her when her father enters the kitchen, when he and her mother end up as close to a screaming match as they ever have while she and Liz are quite literally caught in the middle, trying not to get caught in the crossfire. Her mother ends up storming out of the kitchen, Liz following her, and that leaves Ellie alone with her dad.

Her dad, who she’s always been more than a little afraid of; her dad who she always thinks she’s disappointed.

Her father, who looks older and tireder than she’s ever seen him, who is sitting at the table looking utterly defeated.

She pours him a cup of coffee in his favourite Notre Dame mug, brings it over to him. And when she places it down on the table, she does something that she can’t remember ever doing; she puts her hand on his shoulder, leans down and kisses his cheek, lets her head rest there for a moment. He doesn’t say anything, but he leans into her, covers her hand with his, and in that moment, there is no need for words.

They are there for one another, and that is all that matters.

Just like they are there for one another later on that night, when they go to a special Mass for Zoey, where they pray for her return. She does not look at the grounds of the White House on the way there, has seen the shrine that has sprung up there on CNN, doesn’t want to see it in reality, because this is too real already. Just like it is real when her father grips her hand tightly as they walk into the chapel, when she sits there beside him as the priest reads Mass, and she finds herself praying harder than she thinks she ever has in her life.

Afterwards, before they leave, she is once more at her father’s side, when they go to the side of the church. His hand shakes as he lights a candle, stares at its light for a long time, and if he notices that she lights two, then he passes no comment.

Instead he takes her hand, helps her up and leads her out to the motorcade.

>*<*>*<

Contrary to the doctors’ advice, and everyone else’s, Greg checks himself out of hospital a scant forty-eight hours after being checked in. Zoey has been missing a little under twenty-four hours by then, and the only reason he agrees to promise that he’ll rest is that he knows he’s going to spend the next who-knows-how-long lying on his couch watching CNN, remote control in one hand, telephone in the other. He might not be able to travel to Washington to be with Ellie in person, but he can sure as hell be there in spirit.

His doctors are, to put in mildly, concerned. The guys from the lab, Nick in particular, are beside themselves over it, and even John raises an eyebrow or two about it, and he’s the only one who knows the real reason that Greg is checking himself out early. He understands it though, even if he’s not happy about it, and he promises the doctors that he’ll keep an eye on Greg, will whisk him back to the hospital if there are any complications.

Greg is doing this for Ellie, but she’s far from happy about that fact when he tells her about it, his first task when happily ensconced in front of CNN to ring her to let her know he’s home.

“Are you out of your mind?” are her first words, after a long pause which he took advantage of to move the phone away from his ear. He knows Ellie, knew that was going to happen. “What the hell are you thinking Greg?” she continues, and despite the distance between the receiver and his ear, he can hear every word loud enough to make him wince. “You need to be in the hospital, you need to be where people can take care of you…”

“Ell, all they can do is give me pills and change my dressings,” he tells her practically, the same words he used with the doctors. “I can take the pills myself, and John’s going to take me in when the dressings need to be changed. Otherwise, it’s bed rest… and I can do that at home, instead of taking up a bed that a real sick person needs.”

She sighs on the other end of the phone, and he has a sudden image of her, curled up on her bed, her fingers kneading her bridge of her nose. “Greg…” she breathes, but that’s all she says, and he fights back a sigh of his own.

“Ellie, I know what I’m doing, ok? And I promise you, if I feel the least bit worse, I’ll head back to the hospital pronto.”

A sniff, and his heart does something funny at the sound. “Promise?”

“Yes. Now, tell me about you.” Because no matter how worried she might be about him, he knows she’s more worried about Zoey, and for that matter, so is he. “How are you holding up?”

There’s another long silence, then another sniffle. “I’m ok,” she tells him, though he doesn’t believe her for a second. “Mom’s not talking to Dad, and Gus is acting up, Annie’s not eating… Dad’s just walking around in a daze, trying as hard as he can not to go anywhere near the Oval Office…” She breaks off then, swallows audibly. “When I think of all the times I’ve wished I wasn’t the President’s daughter…”

Greg knows well how many times she’s thought that; he remembers the long conversations in the run-up to her father deciding to run for President in the first place, how she would go back and forth over whether it was a good idea. He remembers the actual campaign, the stories she told him about her rare appearances on the road, about how hard it had been for her to complete her final college exams with the media blitz dogging her every move. He remembers the insanity of those final few days in Manchester, remembers hugging her as the results came in, and later on that night, at the party at the farm.

“It’s going to be ok Ellie,” he promises her, even though there’s a tiny nagging doubt in his mind, because he knows exactly how long Zoey’s been missing, knows the chances of finding her alive decrease with every hour. And since Ellie’s just as smart as he is, if not more so, he knows she knows that too. But he continues with the lie anyway, because he wants to believe it. “They’re going to find her and she’s going to be fine, and in a few weeks, she’ll be back to teasing us about you and me, and we won’t even remember this…”

There’s a soft sob from the other end of the line, and he knows Ellie is crying. “I hope you’re right,” she whispers, and he forces a smile to his lips.

“She’s a strong kid Ellie,” he reminds her. “She’ll get through this.” He pauses then, pictures the woman on the other end of the line, remembers the things they’ve been through together, the times they’ve cried in one another’s arms. “And so will you.”

She sobs again at that, and he says nothing for a long time, just lets her cry quietly and wishes he could be there. She stops when he can hear another voice on the line, her sister Elizabeth if he remembers correctly, and when she talks to him again, Ellie tells him something about a summons from her father and he lets her go then, making her promise to call him if she needs to talk.

Over the next two days, that’s exactly what she does, and he’s glad of it, for both their sakes. She needs to talk to someone about how she’s feeling, her fears, her worries, someone she knows she can trust implicitly. He’ll fill that role for her, he always has, and it serves a purpose for him too, firstly because it takes his mind off his own troubles, secondly because he’s just as worried about Zoey as she is.

Otherwise, his hours are divided between trying to sleep, watching CNN, and entertaining his friends, from work and otherwise, who stop by to see how he’s doing. He’s sure that a few of them wonder why he refuses to turn off the television while they’re there, or even to mute the sound, but no-one asks, and he doesn’t volunteer any information. He’s never once breathed a word about his relationship with the First Family; he’s not about to start now. John is a godsend throughout, a friend who understands why Greg’s taken over the television, a friend of Ellie’s to boot, who’s just as worried about her as Greg is. He takes Greg to the hospital on the second day to get his dressings changed, deals with cooking – read, calling the local takeout joints – and cleaning, brings him whatever he needs. Most important though, he plays the same role for Greg that Greg is playing for Ellie, listening to him give voice to his concerns.

As luck would have it, both of them are in the living room, Greg lying on the couch, John lounging in one of the armchairs, when the breaking news icon flashes across the screen. They’re instantly alert, John sitting bolt upright in the chair, Greg swinging himself up to a sitting position, barely registering the pain that lances through his back at the motion. For a terrifying second, Greg is sure of what he’s going to see, news that they’ve found Zoey’s body, and he holds his breath as his heart begins to race, his palms sweating.

Then Paula Francis’s face appears on the screen and she says the five most beautiful words that Greg has ever heard.

“Zoey Bartlet has been found.”

There is a beaming smile on the woman’s face, a matching one quickly spreading across Greg’s, and he’s hardly able to take in the details, something about an FBI raid on a farmhouse, a shoot-out, but they have found Zoey, and she is alive.

He does however take in that the First Family are on their way to the site, that they’ll soon be reunited and he’s reaching for the phone, pressing the speed dial number one, Ellie’s cell phone. It’s turned off, so he leaves a simple message.

“Ell, it’s me… I just saw the news, and I don’t know when you’re going to get this… but I just wanted you to know how happy I am for you… give Zoey my love, ok? I’ll talk to you later.”

He hangs up then, throws the phone down on the couch beside him, turning to John with a smile on his face, then looking back to the television screen, to Paula Francis who is talking to someone standing in front of the White House. The candles and signs are clearly visible in the background, along with the people who are talking quietly, the news evidently spreading among them. He hears what scant details of the rescue there are, and he stays in front of the television, John with him, all night, neither of them getting any sleep, each of them caring even less.

Both are still awake when they hear that Zoey has been taken to Walter Reed Hospital, suffering from cuts, bruises and a broken clavicle. Unsaid is that it could have been a whole lot worse, and the reporter only says that she is recovering there, surrounded by her family. They are there to watch when the President walks to a podium in the Rose Garden, gives a stirring speech about Zoey’s return to them, a speech that has Greg clearing his throat, hoping that John won’t see the tears in his eyes, before he looks over at his friend to see that John is similarly afflicted.

They stay in front of the television until the phone rings, and Greg reaches for it quickly, pausing only for a second to check the caller ID. When he sees the name that appears, he nods at John at the same time as he’s pressing the answer button, saying, “Ellie?”

“It’s me Greg,” she says, her voice shaking, sounding near to tears, and as she speaks, John stands, holding up a hand to indicate that he’s going into his bedroom. Greg nods, appreciating the gesture, but not even half his attention is on his room-mate. Instead, he’s listening to Ellie. “They found her… she’s all right…” Those two sentences are enough to let Greg know that Ellie is indeed crying, but these, he also knows, are happy tears.

“I saw the news,” he says simply. “And we just finished watching your dad’s speech…”

“We watched it in the hospital,” Ellie says. “I was so proud of him Greg…”

“Where are you now?” Greg wonders, because there’s something in her tone that makes him think she’s not at the hospital anymore.

“I’m in the Residence,” she confirms. “Liz and Doug and I came back to get some rest… Mom and Dad and Charlie are there with her now.”

“How are they holding up?” Because he’s heard from her about how strained relations are between her parents at the moment, but he would have thought that Zoey being found would have brought them closer together. From Ellie’s sigh though, he gleans that that’s not necessarily so.

“Mom’s still not talking to Dad… she wouldn’t even watch the speech. And Charlie…” Against all odds, there’s a smile in her voice as she mentions her sister’s ex-boyfriend. “He refused to leave with us… even told Dad that the Notre Dame defensive line couldn’t drag him away.”

Greg’s eyes open wide. “He invoked Notre Dame? To your dad?” There’s another giggle from Ellie, and he loves the sound. “Man, that guy’s definitely in love.”

“Was there ever a doubt?” Ellie asks, and Greg just shakes his head in answer. Charlie and Zoey broke up in part because of Charlie’s job as the President’s body man, in part because Zoey was going to spend a semester in France, and they didn’t think that it was fair to either of them to have a long distance relationship. When Greg had heard that, the similarity between that reason and the reason for his and Ellie’s break-up hadn’t been lost on him, and even when Zoey began dating Jean-Paul, he still hadn’t been able to shake the feeling that one day, she and Charlie would get back together again. Of course, the fact that he’d talked to Charlie recently, and Charlie had told him that he was going to do everything in his power to get Zoey back helped.

There’s something about Bartlet women, Greg notes now. Even when you’ve broken up with them, and no matter how long it’s been since you’ve been together, they still have a way of owning your heart.

Not that he has a problem with that. Not at all.

He’s about to say something along those lines to Ellie when she yawns long and loud, and he laughs instead. “You’re dead on your feet,” he tells her, and he knows he’s right when she doesn’t deny it. “Go to bed… I’ll talk to you later.”

“How are you?” she asks, and he grins, because he knew she wouldn’t let him off the phone without asking that, even if she does sound like she’s half asleep.

“Getting better all the time,” he tells her, and she chuckles. “Now… get some sleep.”

“Yes Sir,” she says, and with that, she hangs up.

She sleeps, and so does he, and over the next couple of days, near normality is resumed. He still calls her every day, more than once, and they talk about everything and anything, but he doesn’t tell her about the nightmares. About how he dreams about the lab explosion, about being blown through glass, but not knocked unconscious. About how he can feel the shards of glass stabbing him, the flames licking his body, about how he hears himself screaming for help that never comes. About waking up screaming, John’s worried gaze at his bedroom door.

Nor does he tell her about how his hands won’t stop shaking, about how he can barely stay at home now without the rolling news on CNN to distract him.

And he certainly doesn’t tell her that five days after the explosion, he is returning to work.

Everyone on the graveyard shift gives him second and third glances, a few wondering to his face if he should be there. He gives them all the same answer, that he’s fine, that he can’t stand being cooped up in the house, that he wants to be here, but pretty soon, they all have bigger things to worry about, like a robbery at the First National Bank, a robbery that claimed the life of one of their own. The news hits Greg hard, makes him sit down, makes his hands shake a little bit harder, and whether it’s because he himself was the victim of a life-threatening incident less than a week previously, or because he’d met Cyrus Lockwood on several occasions and found him to be a nice guy, and a good detective, he’s not sure.

Either way, it’s a case that’s running hot, so he doesn’t have time to think about his shaking hands, barely has time to look at the ruins of the DNA lab across the corridor from him. He deals with an off-the-record matter for Catherine, one that he grasps the implications of immediately but doesn’t comment on, runs the evidence that the rest of the team bring him, and manages to fob off Grissom when the supervisor comments on his hands shaking. Grissom is more understanding about it than Greg might have expected, doing nothing to make him feel ashamed about it, instead telling him that it will get better, that it will just take time.

It is his first day back at work, and Greg more than puts in his fair share of time, also logging his fair share of overtime on it, and when he arrives home, he’s so tired that he can barely see straight. All he wants is his painkillers, a glass of water, and his bed, doesn’t want to deal with John or anyone else, and it’s a surprise to him when he sees his friend standing in the living room, a holdall at his feet.

“You going somewhere man?” Greg asks, rubbing his forehead, because John sometimes goes on business trips, and what with everything that’s gone on in the last few days, Greg holds out no hope of remembering if he’d been told that.

John shrugs, a funny little grin on his face. “I’m gonna stay with Jill for a few days,” he says. “Thought you might want some privacy.”

Greg frowns. “Privacy?” he asks, is just about to ask what he could possibly want privacy for when a third voice speaks.

“Surprise,” it says simply, and Greg’s gaze swivels quickly to the door of his bedroom, where stands a vision.

“Ellie?” Part of him is sure that he’s finally cracked, that worry, fatigue and copious amounts of painkillers have pushed him over the edge. But then Ellie smiles, crosses her arms over her white t-shirt and looks mischievously at John.

“Nine years and I’ve finally rendered him speechless,” she quips, and John laughs.

“Ellie, you’ve been doing that since you guys first met,” he says, heading for the door, dropping a hand on Greg’s shoulder as he passes. “I’ll call later on in the week,” he promises. “Be gentle with him…”

The last is thrown back over his shoulder as a joke, and Ellie laughs. “You have my word,” she promises, and she doesn’t speak again until the door closes behind John. Then her gaze turns to Greg, and all he can do is stare at her. There’s a long silence, during which she frowns. “Greg? Say something?”

All he can do is state the obvious. “You’re here,” he says, and she shakes her head, makes her way across the room to him.

“I got in a couple of hours ago… I thought you might have noticed the agents around the place.” But he hadn’t, had been lost in his own little world, and he shakes his head as she continues speaking. “I called here to let you know I was coming… John told me you were at work.” Her tone registers with him as extremely disapproving, and he’s sure that a lecture is coming, cuts it off before it can begin.

“You didn’t come all this way to lecture me-” he begins, ready to launch into a speech about how he knows his own limits, how he can make his own decisions, but she surprises him when she speak over him.

“You got that right,” she says, and then she is pressed against him, body flush against his, her arms around his neck, and he is holding onto her tightly, burying his face in her hair. Dimly, he realises that not just his hands are shaking, but his whole body, and not just his, but hers too, and when he pulls back from her, he sees that tears are rolling down her cheeks.

“Hey… there’s no need for that,” he says, reaching up to brush them away. Her cheeks grow warm under his palms, and she gives him a shaky smile.

“Look at you,” she whispers, one hand touching the plaster on his cheek, and he takes it in his, twines their fingers together.

“I’d rather look at you,” he replies, and she chuckles.

“Same old Greg.” Her words are light, words that she’s said a million times, but her eyes, her voice, are still filled with tears, and she shakes her head again. “I was so worried about you,” she tells him, and he manages a smile.

“Well,” he quips, sliding an arm around her waist, leading her to the couch. “At least I know what it takes to get you to Vegas…” Because in all the years he’s been living here, she’s never visited. He’s gone to Baltimore, and they’ve met in California, in other places around the country, but this is the first time she’s ever come to his home. Which brings up another question. “How long can you stay?”

“A couple days,” she says. “The hospital was quite generous about giving me time off under the circumstances… the whole world thinks I’m either in Washington or New Hampshire, which suits me fine…”

“Why aren’t you?” He’s curious about that, because he would have thought that at a time like this, family would have been the first thing on her mind. “Not that I’m complaining of course…”

“Because,” she answers firmly, wrapping one of his hands in both of hers, staring down at it. “I needed to see for myself that you were ok… when John called me that day…” Her voice breaks off, and she swallows furiously. “You scared the hell out of me.”

“I know baby…” His free arm goes around her shoulders, pulls her close to him. “But it’s ok now.”

“Is it?” She straightens up, looks right into his eyes. “John told me… about the dreams…”

Greg presses his lips together tightly. “He shouldn’t have done that.”

“I’m more interested in why you didn’t,” she responds, in a voice that’s only slightly accusatory. “You know there’s nothing you can’t tell me.”

“You’ve got enough on your plate-” he begins, but resolution is blazing in Ellie’s eyes, and he knows that’s not going to cut it with her.

“Don’t,” she says. “Don’t you dare.” She doesn’t sound as angry as her words indicate, just worried, with a hint of frustration, and she lays her hand on his uninjured cheek, making it impossible for him to turn his head. “You listen to my problems all the time… you don’t get to decide that I can’t do the same for you. You don’t get to decide what I can’t handle. You understand?”

He leans into her touch, letting out a deep breath. “Yes Ma’am,” he replies, not even trying to stop his lips from twitching, and he’s relieved when she sees the funny side, a giggle escaping her.

“That’s more like it,” she decides, giving him a hard stare. “You’re exhausted, aren’t you?” she demands, and he only spends a second deciding between whether to lie or tell the truth. She wouldn’t believe a lie anyway.

“A little,” he says, and she nods, standing up.

“Come on,” she says. “Let’s get you to bed.”

He lets her pull him to his feet, but then stands firm, not letting her move him. “Where are you sleeping?” he wonders, and her cheeks flush, her eyes not leaving his.

“I put my stuff in your room,” she tells him, and he feels a smile spreading across his face. “Don’t get any ideas,” she quickly adds. “When I said ‘let’s get you to bed’ I meant to sleep.”

“I knew that,” he says, which he does. The fact remains though, that she’s going to be here for a couple of days, and that those are famous first words if ever he heard them. So he doesn’t say anything else, just lets her lead him into his bedroom, and both change quickly for bed, as he tries not to think about how right she looks in this room, and how much he’s missed her.

He has his back to her as she changes, and he’s stripped down to his boxers, is about to pull a t-shirt over his head when he’s stopped by a hand on his shoulder. He turns his head towards her, swallowing hard when he sees the tears in her eyes. “Ellie…” he says, and she shakes her head, her touch gentle as a whisper.

“Let me see,” she murmurs, and he sighs as her hand runs across the dressings at his back. She lifts the edge of one carefully, and he hears her hissing intake of breath, tries not to wince as she pushes it back. When he feels her hand fall, he turns to her, shaking his head as he sees the stricken look on her face.

“Please, don’t cry…” is all he can say to her, and she looks heavenward. He can almost see her pulling herself together, and his hands close on her shoulders, run down her forearms, over the thin cotton of her night-shirt and down the skin of her arms before tracing their way back up again. The t-shirt he had been holding lies forgotten on the floor, and she sighs, her hands going to his chest, one of them resting over his heart.

“I love you,” she tells him quietly. “So much.”

He closes his eyes, lets the words wash over him. “I love you too,” he tells her when he looks down at her again, and this time when he pulls her close, he lowers his lips to hers, initiating a kiss which, he knows, has only marginally less firepower than the explosion at the lab. His hands slide around her back, one moving up to cup the back of her head, fingers tangling in her long hair, the other moving down to the small of her back, pressing their lower bodies together intimately. She gasps at the contact, the noise sending shivers up and down his spine, one small hand sliding up to his neck, playing with the hairs at the nape of his neck. The other hand doesn’t move from over his heart, which, some part of his brain notes, feels as if it’s going to explode in his chest.

He’s surprised when she pulls away, literally wrenching herself out of his arms, putting some distance between them. She lifts a shaking hand to his cheek, breathes his name, and he knows what she’s going to say, because this is hardly the first time that they’ve been in this position. “I know what you’re going to say,” he tells her. “And I don’t care about what happens when you go back to Baltimore… right now, I just want you.”

He would say more, but she slides her hand over his lips, nods just once. “Later,” she says, in a voice laced with promise. “For now, can we just sleep?”

Greg smiles, takes both hands in his. “We can do that,” he tells her, leading her to the bed.

Mindful of the injuries to his back, she steps back, lets him climb in first, and only when he’s comfortable, lying on his side, does she slide in herself. She lies spooned up against him, her back to his chest, and his arms go around her waist from behind, pulling her as close to him as humanly possible. That done, her hands close over his, and they don’t speak after that, just close their eyes and try to relax.

Greg drops off to sleep almost straight away, and for the first night since the explosion, he does not dream.


End file.
